Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

chapter six
the devil’s nemesis:
griet and her sisters
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And there is no anger above the anger of a woman. It will be more agreeable
to abide with a lion and a dragon, than to dwell with a wicked woman.
ecclesiasticus 25:23
But honorable women should
Forgive me what I say, I would
Not wish to injure their good name.
sebastian brant
Taking proverbs literally was a favorite source of laughter in Bruegel’s century,
as we have seen, and Bruegel habitually exploited the visualization
of common expressions and sayings for humorous eªect. Perhaps his most
bizarre eªort occurs in a painting he executed some years before the two
scenes of peasant revels in Vienna. This is the Dulle Griet (Fig. 70), in which
an army of housewives (to judge from their bonnets and aprons) attack
and plunder devils in a fire-flickering infernal landscape. A wild-eyed
crone, considerably larger in scale than her followers, leads the ravaging
horde. She rushes across the center foreground, sword in hand, her
mouth open, apparently in a scream, and her thin, scraggly gray hair
streams from beneath her helmet (Fig. 71). With her left arm she clutches
an unlikely assortment of gold and silver vessels and common household
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